IT promised to be a fabulous festival. The programme included works by the great composers and booked to perform were some of the 20th century's most revered musicians.

Tickets had been snapped-up and rehearsals completed. All was awaiting the first flourish of a baton.

Eagerly anticipated was the premiere of a new work by Gerald Finzi - "Dies Natalis", a cantata for high voice and strings to words by the Herefordshire poet Thomas Traherne.

But the music bonanza scheduled for the Hereford Three Choirs Festival of 1939 - splashed across widely-distributed posters - sounded not one note. It became the festival that never was.

For on September 3 - the day set for the festival's opening service - Britain and France declared war on Germany following the latter's forces invading Poland.

The death toll was to be unimaginable and millions of lives were to be changed forever.

Musicians were no exception including those that had been due to entertain the Three Choirs audiences in Hereford that late summer week.

Two of the soloists became heroines with a difference, demonstrating that the arts were bestowed with the British bulldog spirit that defied the Nazis.

Typical was the legendary pianist Myra Hess who proved to be a virtuoso morale booster.

At the outbreak of war galleries, theatres, concert halls and museums were shut. It was a cultural blackout, but Hess came up with an idea to lift the gloom.

Her lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery were a huge success. Even in the darkest days of The Blitz they were nearly always full - tickets being cheap - and an adjoining canteen, serving delicious refreshments made by a cohort of formidable ladies, added to their popularity.

Cellist Antonia Butler, who had been tutored in Germany's Leipzig - was another to play on regardless.

One of her indelible memories was playing at a Prom the Brahms "Double Concerto" in 1940 when the air raid siren sounded. No one was allowed out so the concert continued until the early hours until the "all clear".

"It was the most exciting and inspiring experience and symbolic of good triumphing over evil," said Butler who, the following year, saw her husband called-up the day after their wedding.

The September 3 declaration must have revived dreadful memories for dynamic Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi whose great love the Australian Olympian rower and musician Frederick Septimus Kelly had died a hero in the First World War.

And as her Hereford performance was cancelled what thoughts crossed the mind of contralto Mary Jarred? She had spent many years with Hamburg Opera and was a renowned exponent of the works of Richard Wagner. Suddenly, everything German was reviled.

Similarly, the mezzo-soprano Astra Desmond - with a voice said to "knock you for six" - had studied singing in Berlin, now a city of enemies.

Hereford Cathedral organist and Three Choirs conductor Percy Hull would have felt a double chill at the outbreak of war.

He must have guessed what the awful toll might be, but he would have also recalled his dreadful years as a civilian prisoner-of-war in Germany in the 1914-18 conflict.

The end of the Second World War in 1945 sparked celebrations throughout the land and for another musician from the ill-fated 1939 festival it brought even greater fame.

Elsie Suddaby - "The Lass with the Delicate Air" - created the soprano part in Vaughan Williams's "Thanksgiving for Victory."